Today's teenagers will enter their prime career years in the mid-2030s — a labour market that will look substantially different from today's. Some of the highest-paid roles in 2035 do not yet exist as distinct professions. Some of today's most common jobs will be significantly automated. Understanding the trajectory of the labour market is not about predicting a specific career — it is about developing the capabilities and orientations that will remain valuable across whatever specific roles emerge.
What We Know About the 2035 Labour Market
Labour market researchers and economists broadly agree on a few patterns. First, automation is advancing fastest in routine cognitive tasks (data entry, standard analysis, pattern-matching tasks) and routine physical tasks (certain manufacturing and logistics operations). It is advancing more slowly in roles requiring genuine creativity, complex relationship management, nuanced judgement, and physical dexterity in unstructured environments. Second, roles at the intersection of technical and human skills — such as those combining technology expertise with communication, ethics, or design — are in persistently high demand. Third, health, education, and care professions are growing in most developed economies as populations age.
Capabilities That Will Remain Valuable
Rather than targeting specific job titles, students should be developing: the ability to learn new skills rapidly in response to changing technology; the ability to communicate complex ideas clearly across different audiences; genuine creative problem-solving that synthesises information from multiple sources; emotional intelligence — the ability to understand, influence, and support other people in complex situations; and ethical reasoning — the ability to assess the implications of decisions across diverse stakeholders. These capabilities appear consistently in research on future-of-work resilience.
The goal is not to predict the future perfectly. It is to develop capabilities that hold their value across a range of possible futures. Flexibility and breadth of capability protect against uncertainty better than narrow specialisation alone.
Fields Most Likely to Grow Significantly
Fields with strong growth trajectories toward 2035 include: renewable energy and climate technology; digital health and healthcare informatics; data science and AI application (particularly in healthcare, agriculture, and policy); mental health services (a persistently underserved field); education technology; cybersecurity; and the vast ecosystem of services and products built around the ageing global population. None of these requires a specific degree title — they can be entered from multiple educational pathways.